An Alternative Take on Urban Development Partnerships: The Marriage of Art and Green in Seattle's Olympic Sculpture Park

Property-based arts economic development (PAED) has been advocated as a mechanism for urban revitalization leading public, private, nonprofit, and community players to champion arts districts, creative office parks, artisanal incubators, and cultural anchor institutions in cities of all sizes and locations. However, few studies have assessed the implementation intricacies of such efforts and how they get done and under what conditions. In particular, research has largely overlooked how these projects fit within the trajectory of planning policy and development cultures. This paper offers a history of the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, Washington, and explores how the Trust for Public Land and the Seattle Art Museum created an alliance to redevelop a contaminated site along Elliot Bay into a public green space amidst development pressures and past failures. The story is framed against a broader framework of how PAED partnerships function and whether they are markedly differently then existing urban political models of behavior. This paper takes a longitudinal, qualitative approach and finds that this strategic nonprofit partnership capitalized on a critical moment to change the face of the Elliot Bay waterfront through building civic capacity and formulating a politically protected implementation strategy. Overall, this analysis provides a robust exploration of how advocates of arts and green economic development engaged in urban revitalization.